Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps his Department has taken to (a) protect and (b) increase the UK’s natural biodiversity.

In the United Kingdom domestic biodiversity policy is devolved. The four nations work together to develop a collective response to United Kingdom wide goals and targets, such as the post-2020 global framework expected to be agreed at the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) Fifteenth Conference of the Parties, COP15 in Montreal in December.

We have taken unprecedented steps to protect and restore biodiversity in England, not least through our world leading Environment Act, which requires a new, legally binding target to be set in England to halt the decline in species abundance by 2030, and introduces Biodiversity Net Gain, Local Nature Recovery Strategies and a strengthened biodiversity duty on public authorities to work together to protect our native species.

We have also committed to protecting 30% of our land and sea by 2030 to better support and recover biodiversity, and have announced a landmark designation programme to help realise this.

We published a Nature Recovery Green Paper earlier this year that sets out our initial thoughts on reforming protected sites and species protections to better drive nature’s recovery in England, including expanding and improving wider protected areas.

In the last year in England, we have also created a new Somerset Wetlands super National Nature Reserve that will protect 6,140 hectares of precious habitats, launched the 21,000 hectare G7 Nature Recovery Legacy Project in Cornwall, in addition to 5 more landscape-scale projects that will help nature recover across an estimated 99,000 hectares and completed the Back from the Brink programme with 96 priority species moving towards recovery.